Chapter 2
He left the house next morning in a far more despondent mood. 'I should have been warned by that casserole that she had some bloody ominous message to impart,' he muttered as he set off for the Tech. And Eva's announcement that she had found a lodger for the top flat had been ominous indeed. Wilt had been alert to the possibility ever since they had bought the house but Eva's immediate enthusiasms gardening, herbalism, progressive playgrouping for the quads, redecorating the house and designing the ultimate kitchen had postponed any decision about the top flat. Wilt had hoped that the matter would be forgotten. Now she had let the rooms without even bothering to tell him Wilt felt distinctly aggrieved. Worse still, he had been outwitted by the decoy of that splendid stew. When Eva wanted to cook she could, and Wilt had finished his second helping and a bottle of his better Spanish burgundy before she had announced this latest disaster. It had taken Wilt several seconds before he could focus on the problem.
'You've done what?' he said.
'Let it to a very nice young German girl,' said Eva. 'She's paying fifteen pounds a week and promises to be very quiet. You won't even know she's there.'
'I bloody well will. She'll have lovers fumbling their lascivious way up and down stairs all night and the house will reek of sauerkraut.'
'It won't. There's an extractor fan in the kitchenette up there and she's entitled to have boyfriends so long as they behave themselves nicely.'
'Nicely! Show me some loutish lover behaving nicely and I'll show you a camel with four humps
'They're called dromedaries,' said Eva using the tactic of muddled information that usually distracted Wilt and lured him into correcting her. But Wilt was too distracted already to bother.
'They're not. They're called fucking foreigners and I'm using fucking properly for once and if you think I want to lie in bed every night listening to some ruddy Latin prove his virility by imitating Popocatepetl in eruption on an inner sprung mattress eight feet above my head '
'Dunlopillo,' said Eva. 'You never get things right.'
'Oh yes I do,' snarled Wilt, 'I knew this was in the wind ever since your bloody aunt had to die and leave you a legacy and you had to buy this miniature hotel. I knew then that you would turn it into some foul commune.'
'It's not a commune and anyway Mavis says the extended family was one of the good things about the old days.'
'She'd know all about extended families. Mavis would. Patrick has been extending his family for as long as I can remember, and into other people's.'
'Mavis has given him an ultimatum said Eva. She's not putting up with his carryings on any longer.'
'And I'm giving you an ultimatum,' said Wilt. 'One squeak out of those bedsprings up there, one whiff of pot, one twang of a guitar, one giggle on the stairs and I'll extend this family by finding digs in town until Miss Schickelgruber has moved out.'
'Her name isn't Schickelwhatchamacallit. It's Mueller. Irmgard Mueller.'
'So was one of Hitler's nastier Obergruppenfuhrers and all I'm saying is '
'You're just jealous,' said Eva. 'If you were a proper man and hadn't got hang-ups about sex from your parents you wouldn't get so hot under the collar about what other people do.'
Wilt regarded her hatefully. Whenever Eva wanted to subdue him she launched a sexual offensive. Wilt retired to bed defeated. Discussions of his sexual inadequacies tended to result in his having to prove Eva wrong practically and after that stew he didn't feel up to it.
He didn't feel up to much by the time he reached the Tech next morning. The quads had fought their usual intersororial war about who was going to wear what dress before being dragged off to
